What John did next was the most astonishing. He began working 18-hour days, seven days a week, collecting all public records relating to the nearly 2,000 voters registered at Pct 324 -- including those who didn't vote in 2004, as well as the 895 who officially voted (and 33 who signed a document at the polling place on Election Day but whose ballots were NOT counted). John manually entered these data into immense color-coded Excel spreadsheets which he and I began to pore over. By New Year's Day 2005, John had put in about 1,000 hours! My own contribution might have reached a paltry 300 hours.
By way of self-introduction, 2007 marks my 41st year as a research physicist. I am therefore well accustomed to sifting through Mother Nature's misleading clues in an ongoing struggle to understand some of the realities that she tries so hard to conceal from us. But, like Isaac Newton, I have to admit that own my successes owe largely to my "standing on the backs of giants." That is, physicists of the past provided me a legacy of proven theories as starting points. (In popular terms, I was spared having to "reinvent the wheel.")
But Karl Rove's election fraudsters appear to have created a system that, in retrospect, must have been designed specifically to confound crime scene investigators (at least until after the Joint Session of Congress met to accept the Electoral College results on January 6th). The laws of physics were of zero help to me here. I found myself sifting through misleading clues conjured, not by Mother Nature, but by human beings -- ones possessed of especially criminal minds.
John Brakey found most of the irregular patterns in the data, and I dedicated myself to trying to decide which of these patterns were causes and which were effects. In particular, I wanted to be able to deduce which causes or effects were incidental/innocent and which were artifactual/criminal. I was greatly aided in this quest by bouncing my ideas off Tucson-voting-machine-expert and Ph.D. electrical engineer, Tom Ryan. Tom tended to be the devil's advocate for "incidental/innocent." His counterpoint to my suspicious nature forced me to assemble John's data into all possible quantifiable categories, and seriously consider possible innocent explanations of each. When the dust finally settled, my conclusion was that the evidence irrefutably favors of "artifactual/criminal.
I won't go deeper into my evidence or arguments, beyond emphasizing the following: The poll-worker-instigated annotations on the ballot information slips that John recovered from the morning-after-Election-Day trash at Pct 324 provided a workable mechanism for deliberately creating numerical patterns that are "statistically impossible" if they are supposed to have happened by random accident or poll-worker incompetence (longer story available on request).
Suffice it to say that we had found evidence that Pct-324 poll workers STUFFED the (optical scan) ballot box with HAND COUNTABLE PAPER BALLOTS (HCPBs) that had the effect of shifting the presidential vote in this precinct by at least 12.8%. I am supposing that if the paper ballots in the box had been recounted by hand, the votes on paper would have agreed with the votes counted by the (un-hacked) optical scanner -- even though by my count 44 valid Kerry ballots were made to disappear and 80 Bush ballots were illegally created by the poll workers.
John calls such an act by colluding poll workers "the STACK." The type of person who would shamelessly commit such a crime against our democracy has been examined in immense detail by Mark Crispin Miller in his book Fooled Again. There are certainly enough of these folks (tens of millions) to have infiltrated most or all poll-worker positions in several percent of the polling stations nationwide.
I suppose that by now everyone knows about "the HACK" (specifically, the "Hursti Hack"):
But let my just give the technical summary. In 2004, approximately 40 million Americans voted on optical-scan voting machines employing 1.94w memory cards. The 1.94w card illegally contains "interpreted codes" which can be hacked to change the final ballot counts without leaving a trace ...EXCEPT for the HCPBs inside the ballot box.
So if just a few percent of the ballot boxes are stuffed in the manner that John Brakey and I have uncovered at Pct 324 -- and crooked election officials manage to pick only those precincts for recounts (which are SUPPOSED to have been randomly selected) -- the more widely executed HACK would be covered up.
Is there evidence that this might have been what happened?
The reader should decide for him/herself by inspecting the accompanying graphic labeled "2004 Florida and Pennsylvania Registration and Voting". This graphic was picked from a now-defunct internet site, americanimage.com, which employed raw data found (and still available) at ustogether.org . Graphic available here.
American Image's unique contribution was to show (a) voter registration by party, (b) 2004 ballot tallies for president, (c) voting machine type, and (d) county size, ALL ON THE SAME GRAPH, by using a color scale to portray both (a) and (b). The most spectacular thing you will see in this graphic is that the 24 smallest counties in Florida THAT EMPLOYED DIEBOLD OPTICAL-SCAN machines were the most skewed toward Bush. That is, the dark-to-medium blue colors in the left-hand column signify that 10 to 30% of the electorate were registered Republican in these 24 counties, whereas the medium-green-to-red-magenta colors in the second column from the left signify that 45 to 80% of these same voters appeared to choose Bush in 2004.
Why should the pro-Bush skew be confined mostly to the smallest counties? And why is this skew mainly confined to voters who voted on optical-scan machines?
My answer to the first question is that (1) the smallest counties are probably the most vulnerable to takeovers of the polling places by colluding poll workers (the "STACK"), (2) small counties are less likely to be checked by exit polls, and (3) Karl Rove was thereby enabled to play on the myth of the "Dixiecrat effect" in small rural counties in Florida. As for the second question, it is easy to suppose that Karl knew that the touch-screen machines would the objects of much suspicion, so by minimizing vote theft on the touch screens (in 2004), an illusion of honesty was achieved.
http://www.gregpalast.com/">Greg Palast believes that the 2004 Election was stolen by means of the disappearance of 3.6 million ballots that were cast but not counted. (The U.S. Census Bureau places the figure at 3.4 million.)
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